Alice Hoffman's wonderful new novel, "The Museum of Extraordinary Things," puts all of the author's trademark gifts on display: compelling human drama, finely nuanced characters, a deeply rooted exploration of history and politics, and a beguiling sense of magic that thrums throughout.

Hoffman, the author of nearly 30 books - most recently "The Dovekeepers," which was set in ancient Israel - depicts an entirely different landscape in her new novel: turn-of-the-century New York City. The book explores two famous 1911 fires - one at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory and the other at Coney Island's Dreamland - while also examining Orthodox Judaism, labor politics and the inner workings of the carnival industry.

Coralie Sardie, our protagonist, is a teenage girl living on Surf Avenue, where her father, "a scientist and a magician" known as Professor Sardie, runs an exhibit of wonders and oddities called the Museum of Extraordinary Things. The professor is a shady, domineering and almost villainous man, forcing his daughter, who was born with webbed hands, to swim around a tank like one of his freaks, billing her as the Human Mermaid.

He also insists she swim through the Hudson River at night, disguised as a monster. The hope here is that rumors of this strange creature will drum up headlines, allowing him to create his own monster, which he plans to display in the museum to help boost his flagging finances. "Coralie was the monster that had been sighted from the shoreline," Hoffman writes, "the mysterious creature men wished to either rescue or trap."

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'The Museum of Extraordinary Things'

By Alice Hoffman.

Scribner, 368 pp., $27.99.

It's during one of those evening swims that Coralie first glimpses Eddie Cohen, a man who "had never believed in a world where love was possible," and becomes instantly smitten. Coralie may have escapist fantasies, but Eddie, a newspaper photographer who "focused on crime scenes and disasters," is the one who has actually escaped: from the rigid orthodoxy of his childhood and from the garment industry, where he had been an exploited tailor. Yet rather than structuring her novel as a classic love story, Hoffman doesn't allow the characters to cross paths for hundreds of pages. Instead, the narrative zigzags between these two lost souls, as well as a mystery surrounding a young woman who went missing the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

One of Hoffman's tremendous gifts is that she makes these intersecting narratives equally rich, satisfying and surprising. Eddie is a heartbreaking character, who as a photographer had "trained himself to fade into the background, aware that it was best to be ignored by the players in a scene so that they might, in being unaware of him, be their truest selves."

And the magical realism imbued in Coralie's character ends up making the very specific familial world in which she's trapped feel even more universal - ultimately, despite her otherworldly traits, Coralie is a motherless girl delicately maneuvering through a fraught relationship with her overbearing father.

A third main character is drawn with equal heart and precision: New York City. Though the two fires Hoffman depicts are iconic, each is rendered fresh through exhilarating prose. Take, for example, her description of girls jumping from the windows of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory: "They were like "bright cardinals, bone-white doves, swooping blackbirds in velvet-collared coats."

Hoffman appears equally comfortable among the cramped and sweaty tenements of the Lower East Side, the grand brownstones uptown and the depressing bright lights of Coney Island. Hoffman's prose is sprawling and lyrical; as in her previous books, there is something so juicy and generous about her sentences, as if she's as attuned to her readers' experience as she is to her characters'. Every detail, every bit of backstory, is given the moment we crave it. Indeed, one of the most pleasurable aspects of Hoffman's writing is the seemingly effortless way in which she knows how to answer her readers' questions throughout while still holding the narrative reins tightly enough that the novel's shocking and poignant conclusion buzzes with all of the resonance it deserves.